The proposed research is a study in social history and historical psychiatric epidemiology. Its evidential base is the records of the Essex Quarter Sessions, 1570-1640. Quarter sessions were county meetings held four times a year presided over by justices of the peace. Justices were the principal agents of local government, responsible both for county law-enforcement and administrative matters. As a consequence, mentally deranged individuals no longer manageable by their families or communities were brought to the justices' attention at these sessions. Demographic and social information about the insane party, provided by persons petitioning the justices for remedial action and by the justices' orders disposing of the case, make possible a three part study of this psychiatric population. First, we will explore the prehisory of these cases, particularly attending to family and community attitudes and theories about mental illness and previous attempts at management and care. Second, statistics will be compiled on the incidence (expressed in absolute frequencies not as a rate for a specified unit of population) of psychiatric illness reported to the Essex Quarter Sessions over several decades. We will attempt to provide a breakdown of these population statistics in terms of distributions by sex, age, residence and social class; and to correlate fluctuations in volume of referrals with short and long term economic trends, economics and demographic characteristics of Essex and with sessional institutional changes. The third objective is to describe and measure over time the types of management ordered by the justices: parish care, Bethlehem Hospital, house of correction, etc. A special goal is to examine the notion advanced by Michel Foucault in Madness and Civilization that the 17th century was the age of "The Great Confinement."